‘She likes you too,’ he said, feeding me one of the little doughnut things. ‘She wants you to come and celebrate with us in November, for Dia de los Muertos. We come down here for that to be close to our grandma, Dad’s mom. Then you’ll see us eat some food, holy shit. We eat like we’re about to go to the chair.’

‘What happens for that?’

‘We all meet at the hotel, we dress up, paint our faces, walk up to the graveyard with all the stuff. We sing, we dance, we get sad. We scatter petals on the ground, make flower garlands. And we stay with the ones we’ve lost, all night long. Big crowd of us.’

‘We don’t do anything like that in the UK.’

‘I think every culture has their own way of dealing with grief. We believe during the festival that our loved ones come back to us. We put pictures of them all over their tombs. Trinkets, bottles of perfume, stuff that belonged to them in their lifetimes. Tequila, cookies. To lure them.’

‘So, they come back and eat the cookies and drink the tequila?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he laughed, ‘it’s all to let them know we remember them. To let their spirits know they’re not alone.’

I rested my head against his shoulder. ‘That’s so nice. I should do that. I miss my dad.’

‘He knows you do,’ he told me, stroking my hair. ‘He hears you. You’re not alone you know, not if you don’t want to be.’

I held him around his waist and put my head on his shoulder. ‘You wait till I get crazy. I won’t see your ass for dust.’

‘So you’ll still be lookin’ at my ass, huh?’

‘Maybe.’ I sat up straight, wondering if I should quit while I was ahead – before I got closer to him than was healthy for either of us. ‘Maybe this is too good to be true. Or too true to be any good.’

‘Siento que atrapé un rayo. Pero tal vez ella no quiere ser atrapada.’

‘Translation?’

‘I caught a lightning bolt. But maybe she doesn’t want to be held.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I do want to be held. But I’m so bad for you, Raf.’

‘Why don’t you let me be the judge of that, huh?’ He started laughing. ‘What are you doing to me, girl? You got me lookin’ so crazy right now.’

That pulled me up. ‘Did you just drop a Beyoncé lyric in there?’

He was still laughing. ‘I may have done, yeah.’

And that was all I needed to hear. ‘Take me to bed. Right now.’